Saved at the Seawall: Stories from the September 11 Boat Lift

By Jessica DuLong and Mitchell Zuckoff

Saved at the Seawall is the definitive history of the largest ever waterborne evacuation.

Jessica DuLong reveals the dramatic story of how the New York Harbor maritime community heroically delivered stranded commuters, residents, and visitors out of harm's way. Even before the US Coast Guard called for "all available boats," tugs, ferries, dinner boats, and other vessels had sped to the rescue from points all across New York Harbor. In less than nine hours, captains and crews transported nearly half a million people from Manhattan.

Anchored in eyewitness accounts and written by a mariner who served at Ground Zero, Saved at the Seawall weaves together the personal stories of people rescued that day with those of the mariners who saved them. DuLong describes the inner workings of New York Harbor and reveals the collaborative power of its close-knit community. Her chronicle of those crucial hours, when hundreds of thousands of lives were at risk, highlights how resourcefulness and basic human goodness triumphed over turmoil on one of America's darkest days.

Initially published as Dust to Deliverance, this edition, released in time for the twentieth anniversary, contains new updates: a preface by DuLong and a foreword by Mitchell Zuckoff.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Three Hills
• Release date: May 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501759147

Jessica DuLong

Jessica DuLong, a U.S. Coast Guard-licensed Merchant Marine Officer, is one of the world’s only female fireboat engineers. She’s also a journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek International, Rolling Stone, Psychology Today, CosmoGIRL!, Parenting, Today’s Machining World,  and Maritime Reporter & Engineering News, and other publications. Her passion for the Hudson River took shape at her post in the diesel exhaust-filled engine room of retired New York City Fireboat John J. Harvey, where temperatures climb to 130 degrees. The 1931 vessel, dubbed “Ambassador of the Hudson,” now operates as a living museum, offering free public trips around New York Harbor and an annual whistle-stop tour up the Hudson River, with DuLong at the engine-room controls.      On September 11, 2001, Fireboat John J. Harvey was called out of retirement to pump water at the World Trade Center site. The John J. Harvey’s civilian crew, including DuLong, pumped water alongside FDNY crews for four days. Later recognized in the Congressional Record for “ensuring constant smooth running of the engines” during her service in the days following the attacks, she was also immortalized as a character in Maira Kalman’s award-winning children’s book, FIREBOAT: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey, and featured in Ben Gibberd’s New York Waters. DuLong’s boating and writing worlds first collided with the publication of her essay “Below Decks” in the anthology Steady As She Goes: Women’s Adventures At Sea (Seal Press, 2003)–a piece that was singled out in Publishers Weekly as “stylish” and a “high point” of the collection.

Book preview

PART ONE

THE SITUATION

It is at night that faith in light is admirable.

—Edmond Rostand, Chantecler

CHAPTER 1

It was a jet. It was a jet. It was a jet.

AS THE SUN TRACKS ACROSS THE SKY ON THIS OVERCAST, 78-degree morning, the clouds part ways leaving behind a mazarine blue. There is no dust. No smoke. The heaviness in today’s air is only the humidity of late summer. A forest of sailboat masts bobs in the rectangular notch of Manhattan’s North Cove. The propeller wash from New York Waterway and Liberty Landing ferries dropping off and picking up passengers at the new World Financial Center terminal, 150 paces or so to the north of the small harbor, pushes little waves through the 75-foot gap in the breakwater. Mis Moondance, a 66-foot charter yacht, motors in and maneuvers into a slip among the wooden floating docks. A blue and white police boat holds station just outside the cove’s entrance, blue light flashing above the pilothouse.

To a casual observer, unaware of the date, it might be hard to say if this quiet is just the regular hush of Sunday or something more solemn. Certainly the pedestrian plaza is far less populated on Sundays than it would be on a weekday morning—a Tuesday morning, say. Surely all the street closures and police barricades thwarting access have kept some people away, while reminding any who might have momentarily forgotten that this is no ordinary day.

Several blocks inland, beneath the trees in the National September 11 Memorial plaza, the fifteenth anniversary commemoration has begun. About 8,000 people have assembled for this year’s annual ritual. Families of those lost will read, 30 at a time, the names of the 2,977 people who died from injuries or exposures sustained 15 years ago today, plus the six killed in the bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993.

At 8:46 A.M., bells ring in the plaza and across New York City to announce the first of six moments of silence. This one marks the moment when American Airlines Flight 11 ripped through the northern facade of the World Trade Center’s North Tower between the ninety-third and ninety-ninth floors. By the water’s edge, the chuff-chuff-chuff of a helicopter hovering over the Hudson never lets up. Silence on the waterfront is merely theoretical.

Sunday joggers, earbuds in, digital music players strapped around biceps, continue on their morning runs. Bicyclists keep biking, tourists snap photographs, parents herd young children. But two New York Waterway ferries pause, foregoing their usual over and back, over and back, to linger in reverence. Above them glints the new 1 World Trade Center, the base of its spire reflected in an adjacent skyscraper, also new. Between them stands a third tower, still under construction, the outstretched arm of a crane loitering above its uppermost reaches—a skeleton waiting for workers to finish grafting on its reflective skin.

When the bell chimes again at 9:03 A.M., the moment that United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower’s southern facade between the seventy-seventh and eighty-fifth floors, a lone gentleman with close-cropped gray hair is sitting silently before the cross inside St. Joseph’s Chapel where a special anniversary mass is scheduled to commence at 10 A.M., one minute after the South Tower fell, and 28 minutes before the North Tower followed it to the ground.

The day after the attacks, this chapel was converted into a makeshift, volunteer-run supply house for distributing donated goods. Rescue workers turned its plate glass windows into a message board of sorts, tracing pleas, prayers, and pronouncements into the gray dust: Revenge is sweet. Goodness will prevail. It doesn’t matter how you died, it only matters where you go. You woke a sleeping giant. Among the scrawls was the word "Invictus." Latin for unconquerable, it’s the title of an 1875 poem by William Ernest Henley that begins:

"Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul."

Other messages, more practical than poetic, included: Go to Stuyvesant High School to sleep and Lt. John Crisci call home.

I first transcribed these missives into a small reporter’s notebook while standing in the dust of September 12, 2001. Although I wasn’t technically reporting at the time, a writer’s lifelong habits run deep. I scribbled down the words in an attempt to collect the details that I hoped might somehow help me make sense of the unfathomable ruination at hand. At 28 years old, I was still a newcomer to New York City, having moved here in January of 2000. By the following September, I was just six months into the hands-on apprenticeship that had launched my new career as a marine engineer. I was a novice in every sense of the word.

Now, a decade and a half later, I’ve risen from assistant engineer to chief, a hawsepiper who’s come up through the ranks (climbing, metaphorically, up the anchor chain through an opening in the bow called the hawsepipe) by learning on the job rather than in school. New York harbor’s maritime community is my community.

After 15 years in the industry, my view of everything has changed. Now, on this overcast Tuesday morning, when I notice the dull red paint coating one section of the curved steel railing along the water’s edge, I recognize it as primer, evidence of a painting project in process. This is the railing that I climbed over, on September 12, as I bolted from threats of a fourth building collapse, scrambling to board the boat that had so recently become my workplace: retired 1931 New York City fireboat John J. Harvey. No longer an active-duty vessel with the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY), the boat had been operating as a preservation project and living museum when it was called back into service to help fight New York City’s most devastating fires.

A fireboat is essentially a huge pump, several pumps, in fact, which is exactly what was needed that day. And so fireboat Harvey’s all-volunteer, all-civilian crew (save for our captain, a retired FDNY pilot) worked alongside active-duty fireboats to pump Hudson River water to land-based battalions. Fire mains lay broken. Hydrants were buried beneath debris. For days following the twin towers’ collapse, fireboats provided the only firefighting water available on site. When firefighters bent over their hoses to rinse the dust from their faces, they sputtered and spit in surprise at the taste of salt from the Hudson.

Supporting pumping operations aboard fireboat John J. Harvey was the work that had brought me to Ground Zero. I’d spent the eleventh like so many others: glued to the television, then wandering around my Brooklyn neighborhood trying unsuccessfully to donate blood. My identity as a mariner was not yet ingrained. As I’d watched the staticky news coverage on the only channel that would come in on my television set, it hadn’t occurred to me that the antique, decommissioned fireboat where I was spending more and more of my days as a budding engineer could offer the opportunity to help that I so desperately sought. And so I missed the boat lift.

As thick, gray smoke began spilling through the airplane-shaped hole in the World Trade Center’s North Tower, civilians caught in an act of war—some burned and bleeding, some covered with soot—fled to the water’s edge, running until they ran out of land. Never was it clearer that Manhattan is an island. Within minutes, mariners had raced to meet them, white wakes zigzagging across the harbor. Long before the Coast Guard’s call for all available boats crackled out over marine radios, scores of ferries, tugs, dinner boats, sailing yachts, and other vessels had begun converging along Manhattan’s shores. Hundreds of mariners shared their skills and equipment to conduct a massive, unplanned rescue. Within hours, nearly half a million people—adults and children—had been delivered from Manhattan by boat.

This became the largest waterborne evacuation in history—more massive even than the famous World War II rescue of troops pinned by Hitler’s armies against the coast in Dunkirk, France. In 1940, hundreds of naval vessels and civilian boats rallied to rescue 338,000 British and Allied soldiers over the course of nine days. But on September 11, 2001, boat crews evacuated an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 civilians in less than nine hours. The speed, spontaneity, and success of this effort were unprecedented.

In the years since, countless shattered lives have been remade, fractured families reconstructed, loves lost and found. The Pile—16 acres of wreckage left at the World Trade Center site—was eventually excavated and redubbed the Pit before being transformed into a memorial with twin reflecting pools that occupy the square footprints of the vanished towers. Americans’ pre-9/11 sense of security, along with a misbelief in our immunity to the carnage and cruelty suffered by the rest of the world, was sabotaged and replaced with a gnawing new normal. This post-9/11 afterward was characterized by anxiety and suspicion coupled with an acquiescence to new infringements on privacy and freedom. But what also arose in the aftermath of the deadliest terrorist attacks on U.S. soil was a heightened sense of goodwill, an abundance of comity, and an instinctive impulse to help. Amid the darkness and chaos, a series of lifesaving, selfless acts transformed the waterfront of New York harbor into a place of hope and wonder.

By the time I arrived at the trade center, tugs and other vessels lining the seawall had shifted gears from ferrying people to running supplies and other critical support operations. In the hazy, horror-filled, dust-choked days that followed, I didn’t grasp how history had been made along Manhattan’s shores. Indeed, still today few people recognize the significance of the evacuation effort that unfolded on that landmark day. This book addresses that omission. The stories that follow are the culmination of nearly a decade of reporting to discover how and why this remarkable rescue came to pass—what made the boat lift necessary, what made it possible, and why it was successful.

On any given Tuesday in 2001, you could stand at the southern tip of Manhattan Island, gaze out over the water, and watch the busyness of New York harbor unfold before your eyes. You’d doubtless notice a Staten Island Ferryboat, in all its enormous orange glory, bridging the 5.2-mile gap between the two island boroughs. Looking up the west side, you’d see smaller white and yellow fast ferries darting across the three-quarter-mile span of the Hudson that separates Manhattan from New Jersey. Maybe you’d track the movements of a recreational sailor, playing hooky on a weekday, tacking back and forth through the sparkling salt water to drink in the last of the summer sun. Over toward the east side, on the approach to the half-mile expanse of the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, you might lay eyes on a black-hulled freighter making its way to tie up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Scanning across the waters straight ahead, your view bracketed by container cranes in Brooklyn’s Red Hook Terminal on the left and Port Elizabeth’s and Port Newark’s on the right, you’d perhaps catch glimpses of the working harbor carrying out its workaday business: a tugboat pushing barges filled with scrap metal or stone; another tug in the anchorage securing empties to await a fair tide; a North River-bound bulk freighter, the booms of its white deck cranes outstretched like dueling swords; a containership, nudged along through the channel by shipassist tugs. Or maybe you’d even spot a honey boat hauling sewage sludge from local wastewater treatment plants, or an Army Corps of Engineers drift collection vessel plucking flotsam from the water to remove hazards to navigation. Together these watercraft, working side by side, under the oversight of the U.S. Coast Guard, perform the critical functions of the Port of New York and New Jersey.

Still, much of the activity of New York harbor would remain unnoticed. A quick tour of the numbers reveals how much activity there was in September of 2001. Back then, New York harbor provided passage to 91,600 commuters and accommodated between 25 and 30 large, international, deep-draft, commercial vessels on an average weekday. Including 30 billion gallons of petroleum and petroleum products, more than $93 billion worth of cargo moved through the port annually, generating a total of $29 billion in economic activity while serving more than 17 million customers in the states of New York and New Jersey. More than 167,000 people made their living directly from all this traffic.

New York harbor was, and is, a busy place—the third largest container port in the United States and a vital connection between New York City and the rest of the world. But other than the passenger ferries, whose crews interface directly with their customers, much of the hard work of the harbor’s working watercraft happens—now, as it has since the latter half of the twentieth century—largely out of view. Manhattan is an island, and the realities of island real estate are what ushered the port’s industries off Manhattan’s shores and over to Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey in the 1960s and ’70s.

Although port workers handle nearly every item in New Yorkers’ home and work lives on its arrival from overseas, most residents hardly give the harbor a passing thought. By late 2001, the last vestiges of the borough’s working waterfront had been rapidly uprooted and replaced with sparkling esplanades festooned with iron railings and polished stone. Maritime infrastructure (cleats, bollards, fendering, and other features necessary for a safe tieup) had been replaced with ornamental fencing. An island that had once berthed legions of vessels now had a waterfront that was mostly geared toward recreation and people’s enjoyment of a passive view.

On September 11, 2001, as the cascade of catastrophe unfolded, people found their fates altered by the absence of that infrastructure and discovered themselves dependent upon the creative problem solving of New York harbor’s maritime community—waterfront workers who’d been thrust beyond their usual occupations and into the role of first responders.

It was a jet. It was a jet. It was a jet. The time was 8:46 A.M.

Patrick Harris had been sipping coffee at the open helm of his 63-foot wood sailing charter yacht Ventura, chatting with the boat’s maintenance man, when he heard the roar of engines up close. He looked up in time to watch the tail of a jet airplane penetrate the north face of 1 World Trade Center, less than 1,000 feet away from where his boat was tied to a floating dock in North Cove, the small harbor notched out of Manhattan’s western shore where the World Financial Center meets the Hudson.

In my mind’s eye I can still see a frozen Kodachrome of the tail end of the aircraft—the rudder mechanism and the back fifth of the plane—disappearing into the building, he explained. As soon as it slammed in, there was total silence.

Two seconds later, five stories of windows lit up in bright orange like a pinball machine. Harris heard a whoosh like a barbecue grill igniting and saw a fireball blast through the north face of the building. A big, black billowing cloud with orange flashes in it burst into the clear blue sky.

The captain sat stunned for a moment before reaching for his marine VHF radio, the standard radio equipment installed aboard vessels large and small that operates over the very high frequency maritime mobile band. With one hand on the wheel, he pulled the microphone off its clip and depressed the button with his thumb. "United States Coast Guard, Group New York. Sailing vessel Ventura on one-six."

"U.S. Coast Guard Activities New York to the Ventura."

Here, Harris froze. The maintenance man had repeated the word three times in the instant after impact, confirming what Harris had witnessed. But now the captain couldn’t bring himself to say the word jet. There’s been a tremendous explosion at the World Trade Center, he said. It looks like five to eight stories are on fire. You’re going to need some backup here.

All protocol fell away. What?!? said the youthful voice on the other end of the transmission. In that instant, Harris felt the shift as the formality of a vessel captain calling the Coast Guard vaporized.

It looks like a plane hit, he continued, haltingly, explaining that he planned to head on foot toward the towers with his handheld and would radio back with whatever information he could gather.

Harris, calling just seconds after American Airlines Flight 11 had rammed into the North Tower, was the first to notify the U.S. Coast Guard of the unfolding disaster.

Word traveled quickly up the chain to the deputy commander of the Coast Guard’s Activities New York, who, as it happens, was also named Patrick Harris. That morning Rear Admiral Richard E. Bennis was out of town, leaving Deputy Commander Harris as the acting captain of the Port of New York and New Jersey, the Coast Guard’s largest operational field command. At the Coast Guard station in Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, a watch stander interrupted the morning meeting with: Hey, Captain, I think you oughta take a look at this.

Harris stepped a few feet away into the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) center, a dark room full of monitors, phones, VHF radios, and radar screens glowing brightly as they offered a detailed overview of more than 40 nautical square miles. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, operators manned this maritime equivalent of an air traffic control center, monitoring the movements of vessels traveling through the Port of New York and New Jersey. To prevent vessel collisions and groundings, expedite ship movements, increase transportation system efficiency, and improve operating capabilities in all weather, they tracked traffic by remote radar and live television cameras mounted strategically throughout the harbor, and communicated with each vessel via phone or VHF. On a typical day the VTS supervised and assisted about 750 large vessels passing through the port.

Suddenly, this was no typical day. All eyes were trained on the live feed from a dozen of the 16 strategically placed cameras that showed 1 World Trade Center, the North Tower, burning. On the television in a nearby break room, CNN reported that a small plane had hit the tower. This news left the deputy commander, a career aviator with 34 Air Medals from his Vietnam service, uneasy. As a pilot, he couldn’t believe that a small plane could have done this kind of damage.

So far, in the minutes before 9 A.M., the incident was land-based, not technically of Coast Guard concern, but a 41-foot search and rescue utility boat was dispatched to the scene, just in case. Harris grabbed the phone and dialed Rear Admiral Bennis who, at the time, was in Northern Virginia cruising down I-95 South with his wife. Get to a television, Harris advised. We don’t know what happened, but a plane just hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center.

One hour earlier, Tammy Wiggs had walked across the five-acre, stone-paved plaza at the heart of the World Trade Center complex on her way to the New York Stock Exchange. The newly minted Georgetown University graduate had held her new job as a Merrill Lynch clerk for only a week and a day. Although she wasn’t expected at 11 Wall Street until after eight, her determination to make a name for herself straight out of the gate had prompted her to leave her Upper East Side apartment at 6:15 A.M. for the chance to show her face, walk around, shake hands, and chat up the traders at the desk in 4 World Financial Center. She planned to be one of those traders one day. While most clerks stopped in for a meet-and-greet one or two mornings per week, 22-year-old Wiggs, a self-described naturally competitive person, planned to outshine them all with daily visits. Everyone would remember her face.

At about quarter to eight she’d finished making her rounds and headed outside. Relishing the bright morning sun, she crossed the plaza at the foot of the two 110-story towers that had claimed title, at their 1973 ribbon-cutting ceremony, as the world’s tallest buildings. The twin towers had since become the nerve center of the bustling financial district, a must-see tourist attraction, and a central focus of the New York skyline.

Along her way, Wiggs passed planter boxes, stone benches, a stage set for summer performances, and the public plaza’s cynosure at the center of a spill-over fountain: a 25-foot-high bronze sphere sculpture, created by German artist Fritz Koenig, that symbolized world peace through world trade. This was a fitting centerpiece to the complex that architect Minoru Yamasaki had designed as a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace and a representation of man’s belief in humanity.

Now 50,000 people worked in the vast, seven-building World Trade Center complex that housed some 1,200 companies and organizations. Featuring restaurants, a shopping mall, and a belowground transit hub, the site saw an average of 90,000 visitors daily. Just six weeks earlier, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had leased the property, now more than 99 percent occupied, to a private developer, Larry Silverstein, who’d agreed to pay the equivalent of $3.2 billion over the next 99 years.

But none of that was on Wiggs’s mind as she made her way to Wall Street. Ten minutes later, with a heady mix of exhilaration and fear, she stepped into the New York Stock Exchange coatroom, swapped heels for Steve Madden loafers, and donned her black, mesh-backed floor jacket with the Merrill Lynch bull patch on the sleeve. Then she passed through the turnstile and strode to her station in a room dubbed the garage.

Up close, the stock exchange floor looked in real life just like it did on television: a cluster of round islands littered with computer keyboards and blinking screens. What struck Wiggs most about the space, which at this hour thrummed with pre-opening-bell anticipation, was its gymnasium vastness. People milled about issuing good mornings, coffee cups in hand. Wiggs felt like the new kid—female at that—walking into a guys’ locker room.

She was standing in her spot at one of Merrill Lynch’s booths, checking the breaks to make sure all of Monday’s trades had gone through correctly, when she heard a thump that sounded like a truck hitting a building. It was 8:46 A.M. A murmur rose across the floor as television screens lit up with announcements that a small plane had struck the North Tower. At first the chatter centered around how this new development might fit into the trading day. But then, at 9:03 A.M., a collective gasp erupted.

Across the Hudson River, about five miles to the north, Michael McPhillips was working aboard a converted car ferry docked in Weehawken, New Jersey, that now housed offices for the ferry company New York Waterway. A lifelong mariner, he’d run away to sea at 16 and traveled the world aboard ships before taking a position as Waterway’s port captain, charged with supervising vessel deployment, terminal oversight, management of captains and deckhands, vessel maintenance, and Coast Guard compliance. He was busy checking the day’s schedule, making sure the ferryboats were running smoothly and on time, when a deckhand called to tell him the World Trade Center was on fire.

He drove a half-mile to the work dock and corporate offices, dialing his superiors en route. After coordinating with company vice president Donald Liloia and rounding up two mechanics to work as deckhands, McPhillips commandeered the ferry Frank Sinatra, which had been out of service with one of its four engines down. Confident that he could adjust the throttles to compensate for the downed engine, McPhillips pulled the boat off the dock and shot straight for the World Financial Center. As he stood in the wheelhouse, it looked like the whole top of the North Tower was afire.

New York Waterway, which carried 32,000 passengers on an average weekday, had no plan for what to do if a plane struck a trade center tower. But the company did have a protocol for dealing with service interruptions of the PATH train—the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation’s commuter rail connecting New Jersey to Manhattan through tunnels under the Hudson River. Since the railway terminated right beneath the World Trade Center complex, there was little doubt that a fire would provoke a PATH shutdown, leaving New Jersey commuters hunting for other ways to get home. And so Waterway went immediately into stopgap mode to offer alternative transportation.

Deployment was a piece of cake, McPhillips recalled years later. It was rush hour, so most of the boats were already crewed-up and operating. Instead of letting the boats wind down, as they usually did by late morning, the managers ordered crews to keep running.

The white-tent-covered barge that functioned as the World Financial Center’s ferry-loading platform was swarming with people when McPhillips dropped off Liloia. The vice president would manage passenger boarding by land; McPhillips would oversee operations by water. The boats would work overtime until train service was restored. This plane crash was a terrible accident. Just a fire. Everything will settle down by evening rush hour. With this thought, McPhillips set about leading ferryboat captains in transporting boatloads of people off the island.

Minutes later, Waterway’s director of operations Peter Johansen also arrived at the ferry terminal. He’d been